by Tom Bissell
I noticed that when Hale performed as Shepard, her lush, dulcet speaking voice hardened, somehow, as though edged in concrete. “Shepard’s a military person,” Hale told me later. “Military people do not get what they want by being emotional.” Indeed, during the session Hale stopped herself a few times because she knew she had gone “too emotional.” It was not merely Shepard’s martial bearing that constrained Hale. Because of the non-linearity of the dialogue, she had to be vigilant about letting feeling from one line spill over into another. Hale performed with an intensity that she could, apparently, summon at will. She seemed to immerse herself, often looking around manaically her teeth bared in primate agitation. Then as the context of a new line was explained to her, she would pace, picking at a cuticle or rubbing her arms or looking intently at her screen.
The loneliness of acting in a booth, with no one to respond to, can be difficult. “It has to be all in my head,” Hale told me. “Environment, ambient noise, history with this person, what I need from this person, what I want from this person—all these decisions have to be made on the fly, in the moment, as quickly as possible.”
Quite often, before Hale would do her takes, Livingstone would say something like, “Okay, you’ve just finished a big fight.” Other contextual phrases Hale was fed to color her takes included “professional,” “romantic,” “combat,” “intimate, not romantic,” “not romantic,” “distance,” “before combat,” “walking” (also known as “walk-and-talk”), “exertion,” and “after combat.” Sometimes Hale was not always able to recall the space-opera particulars of the Mass Effect universe. When the criminal organization Cerberus was mentioned in one exchange, Hale paused to ask, “Is this the first time I’ve heard of Cerberus?” Walters, without missing a beat, reminded Hale that Shepard spent the entirety of the previous Mass Effect in Cerberus’s employ. Hale later maintained that she was asking if this was the first time Shepard had heard of Cerberus in Mass Effect 3, but I wasn’t so sure. Either way, it was like hearing Tom Hanks ask, “Which one is Woody again?” in a Toy Story 3 outtake.
Hale was born in Labrador in 1972, and holds dual Canadian-American citizenship. She grew up mostly in the American South. Her mother, who died four years ago, was what Hale called “a wandering master’s degree pursuer” who eventually settled on a career in epidemiology. Hale’s biological father is an outdoorsman and intellectual (“He’d be really pissed if he heard me call him an intellectual”) who still lives in Labrador. The man who Hale says “has been my dad most of my life,” and who was married to Hale’s mother for five years, is a semi-retired microbiologist and researcher for the Gates Foundation. Based on this, one might imagine Hale’s childhood as a procession of bookish family dinners, cheerily contested Trivial Pursuit games, and bedtime stories starring friendly prokaryotes. In reality, Hale told me, “I had, probably, a more challenging experience growing up than most middle-class chicks.”
She got on well with her stepfather but did not get to know her biological father until she was in her twenties, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one. “She was in a lot of emotional pain,” Hale told me. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know that. You just know someone’s screaming at you, and flailing at you and kicking you around mentally and emotionally.” Hale’s mother told young Jennifer that she was half Native American; that she was born so premature that she nearly died; that she was descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth. None of this was true, but it may have helped prepare Hale for a lifetime of pretending to be other people. Hale now thinks that her mother’s prevarications must have been a way to assuage her crippling sense of inferiority.
One of Hale’s first acting roles was when, as a teenager in Birmingham, Alabama, she was asked to perform voice-over on the radio and paid thirty-five dollars for her trouble. “For talking,” she said. “For talking! I was out of my mind.” Hale believes that one of the reasons she was hired for the job was that her mother had discouraged her from speaking with a Southern accent. She went on to study acting at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham Southern College, but found that the latter’s program did not suit her. “The style was broader than what I was interested in doing,” she told me. “I wanted something more filmic.” Hale eventually got a degree in business. Her explanation: “You gotta eat.”
Amazingly, when she auditioned for her first film—an NBC movie of the week—she booked the part. After other roles, she was selected, out of six thousand aspirants, during a nationwide search conducted by the soap opera Santa Barbara. “At the time I wore giant T—shirts and baggy pants and there were some seriously hot girls in this line. I was like, ‘How did this happen?’” Hale did a couple episodes of Santa Barbara. After that, she worked steadily as a regional actor, but in search of “a bigger game to play” made the inevitable move to Los Angeles.
In the nineties, Hale made the rounds on shows that reliably cycled through young actors—Melrose Place, ER, Charmed—but after two years of this she was desperate for more stable and lucrative work. She told me, “I thought, Well, I’ll just take voice-over and see if I can make some money there.” A month later, she had landed her first cartoon series, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? To the best of Hale’s recollection, she had, at that point, never seen a cartoon in her life. She struggled, initially, with the unfamiliar demands of cartoon voiceover and enrolled in a cartoon acting class, where she learned how to “bring a tiny being to life” and travel “so far away from my physical self and stretch my voice to a different place.”
It was through Carmen Sandiego that Hale first discovered video-game acting. The cartoon spawned a video-game spinoff, and Hale was brought in to record for it. She was startled by the disassociated, scattershot approach of the process, as when she was asked to record dozens of geographical factoids. “We’re doing how many flags?” she remembers thinking. “I have to say the name of how many countries? How is this going to be used?” She shrugged. “I didn’t get it.”
From there, Hale moved comfortably into commercial voice-over—a field that, when she was starting out, was dominated by men. She begged her agent to give scripts specifically written for male actors and, to her agent’s surprise, began booking those roles, too. Nowadays, Hale noted happily, “it’s mostly women you hear narrating commercials.” When I asked Hale if she felt similarly proud of having broken into action video games, probably the most male-oriented voice-over field of all, she smiled. “I like to take the boys’ jobs,” she said.
For years, many of the “actors” corralled for video-game voice-over were game developers themselves, and the results were predictably indifferent. One of the first game franchises to pioneer the use of high-profile film and television actors in video games was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto, though in the last few years Rockstar has moved in the opposite direction, hiring relatively unknown talent for prominent roles. Michael Hollick’s Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV and Rob Wiethoff’s John Marston in Red Dead Redemption are generally ranked among the finest video-game performances to date, and the performances are extraordinary, in part, due to the unfamiliarity of the actors’ voices. Overexposure is thus a pressing concern for video-game actors, and Hale spoke several times of her worries that, one day, her voice might be thought too recognizable.
The voice-over community is, by acting standards, an unusually cordial one. Hale’s friend Nolan North, who portrays Nathan Drake in the Uncharted franchise and is possibly the most recognizable male voice in video games today enthused about the nature of the community. “It’s not filled with jealousy,” he said, “and we go head-to-head for jobs. We’re never mad at each other for getting something.” North believes that this collegiality is a by-product of the invisibility of video-game actors in the culture at large. “If you’re talented and a handful, there’s no place for you,” he said. “The people who do well in voice-over are the people who are genuine. Everybody makes the same amount of money, too. There’s not the disparity of income you
see in other areas of acting.”
“We’re paid a flat fee,” Hale told me. “We get no percentage of any kind. That fee is based on union scale. If you’re very lucky you can get over scale.” A few years ago, she said, she was paid twelve hundred dollars for a game that made two hundred and seventy million. I asked if that was at all galling, but she deflected my question, pointing out that game developers “do all the front-end work, and they do all the back-end work.”
David Hayter, a friend of Hale’s who portrays Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is rumored to have been paid more for the role than the industry average, though he would not comment on that. A successful screenwriter whose credits include X-Men and Watchmen, Hayter is so deeply associated with Snake that is has become, effectively, his only role. Apart from those projects that his “twelve—year—old self couldn’t say no to”—he recently agreed to play a Jedi in a LucasArts game, for instance—Hayter has more or less given up video-game acting, which makes him slightly more willing to discuss the ways in which game actors are paid and, arguably, underpaid. “The video-game industry is actively trying not to go the ways of movies, with residuals and things like that,” Hayter told me. “If you starred in a movie that made $250 million,” he said, “you’d get more for your next movie. That doesn’t happen in games. You get, maybe, double scale.” But then, video game actors lease out a smaller portion of their essence than film actors: voices, after all, are more interchangeable than faces.
Toward the end of her day at the studio, Hale came to a scene with a character referred to as A/K. It was the most emotional scene of the day, and also one of the most technically tricky, because of the way that player’s choices in Mass Effect 1 and 2 carry over into the new sequel. A/K refers to two characters, Ashley and Kaiden, both of whom are Shepard’s teammates in Mass Effect 1 (and, depending on Shepard’s gender, potential love interests). Near the end of that game, however, the player is forced to save one character and sacrifice the other, and, in Mass Effect 2, whichever of the two was saved reappears to remonstrate with him or her. The result of that conversation, which can go a few ways, determines how the script-merged but game-distinct character of A/K will interact with Shepard in Mass Effect 3.
The scene Hale was about to perform involved Shepard’s reaction to A/K being harmed. The first line of the scene was simple enough: “Let her/him go.” But Hale had to say it multiple times, with different emphases, in order to communicate every possible state of alarm with which Shepard would regard the sight of A/K in peril. Hale did her customary four takes of “Let her go,” which she followed with four takes of “Let him go.” Two were growly, hateful takes, and two were hard, urgent takes. When she finished, Hale flexed to indicate her deepening transformation into Shepard. She was then told that her lines had to be recorded as though she were running.
“I have a question,” Hale said. “It’s pretty emotional for Shepard here. How big do you want it?”
Walters explained that he wanted Shepard to seem like more of “a real character” in this game, a character who showed “his frailty.” At Walter’s use of the masculine pronoun for Shepard, Hale smiled. “I want Shepard’s vulnerability to come out,” Walters went on, “even though not every player will choose to experience it.”
“Is Shepard sick of fighting?” Hale asked.
Walters winced in slight equivocation. When recording with Mark Meer, they had tried to communicate a war-weary Shepard, Walters said. “But we got feedback that the male Shepard sounded whiny.”
Hale went through the “Let her/him go” process again, recording five takes this time.
“I’ll take Five as the keeper,” Livingston said, “and Four as a backup.”
Hale’s next line was “No!” Livingstone turned to Walters and asked, “Is this a panicked ‘No’, or an angry ‘No’?”
“It’s a”—Walters hesitated—“futile ‘No.’”
Hale nodded. “No!” she said, stirringly, a moment later.
“More compassion,” Livingstone said. “Less heightened.”
Hale tried again, and her “No!” seemed to emerge from some alarmed, half—strangled place in her throat.
By the end of the session, Hale had completed twenty-seven scenes and run through two hundred and twenty lines of dialogue. When I asked Livingstone how many scenes the game contained in total, she answered, “Hundreds.” Livingstone would sit through most recording sessions. How much time would that amount to? I asked, suddenly concerned for her. “I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “Eight hours a day for three months. How long is that?” Over twelve—hundred hours. Hale would get off easier, but by the time Mass Effect 3’s voice production wraps, she will have spent more than three hundred hours portraying Shepard.
Before Hale could stop for the day, she had to perform one last virtuoso task: Shepard’s grunts and pain noises. She was given direction for a pain noise to indicate she had been shot once, a pain noise to indicate she had been hit with a burst of energy, a pain noise to indicate she had been shot while moving, a pain noise to indicate she had been punched, a pain noise to indicate she was nearing death, and a pain noise to indicate she had died.
I decided that I couldn’t leave Los Angeles without playing Mass Effect 2 with Commander Shepard herself. Hale, after some hedging, agreed to try and came to the house where I was staying. A screen came up asking us to select the male or female Shepard. “Are you kidding me?” Hale said, choosing the latter. A load screen came up, and Hale passed the time by excitedly tapping her feet against the hardwood floor. She looked over at me. “Is my head going to explode?”
During her interactions with other characters, I asked Hale whether she would play as the Paragon Shepard or Renegade Shepard. “I’m going to go with the middle—of—the—road Shepard,” she said. “I want to hear my middle responses, because they’re the hardest to land. Filling them with energy and emotion takes a lot of focus.”
Upon hearing her first spoken words in the game—“The distress beacon is ready for launch”—Hale groaned. “Drives me nuts,” she said. “I could have made that better.” When the opening cinematic gave way to actual gameplay, Hale looked helplessly at her controller. She tried, vainly, to move Shepard forward. “Wait,” she said. “What am I missing? The right what moves me?”
“The right stick moves the camera,” I said. “The left stick moves you.”
She had somehow positioned the in-game camera in its least obliging position. “I’m looking at my own tush,” Hale said. Soon she had Shepard running through the hallways of her spaceship as it came under devastating attack. Hale leaned forward to turn up the volume, so as to better hear Shepard’s breathing. Something in her eyes changed, and she began to nod. “This,” she said, “is actually really informative.”
We watched the eerie scene in which Shepard is sucked out of an airlock and into the soundlessness of space, the only sound her increasingly labored breathing as her frantic, thrashing limbs gradually relax into death. Hale sat back. “I remember recording this vividly. It’s really fun to die specifically.”
In the game, of course, Shepard is swiftly resurrected. Soon, Hale had her first taste of combat. She struggled with learning how to take cover, shoot, move while shooting, climb over cover, reload, and find ammunition, all the while keeping the camera centered in front of her. But when the game required Hale to find a grenade launcher and dispatch a platoon of hapless robots, she did so quickly and efficiently. “Handled it!” she said, in a tight, confident voice. It was, I realized, Shepard’s voice. The game soon brought Hale into contact with a character called Jacob, yet another of Shepard’s potential love interests. During Shepard and Jacob’s conversation, Hale mined the paraphrase system to get as much information—and hear as much of her performance—as she could. At one point in the conversation, Hale cringed. “There’s a segue error there,” she said. “The energy in the transition was wrong.” I pointed out that she could hardly control that. T
his was true, Hale said, but “I need to have that information somewhere.”
After an hour so, she indicated that she was ready to stop playing. But I realized that the next sequence would bring Shepard into her first contact with a character known as the Illusive Man, who is played by Martin Sheen—an actor she had never met. “We should really keep going until you have your conversation with Martin Sheen,” I said.
Hale perked up. “I should always have my conversation with Martin Sheen. He’s my favorite president.”
During the interaction with the Illusive Man, Hale pursued every available line of conversation possible, trying to hear as much of her performance as she could. When the Illusive Man, at last, dismissed Shepard, Hale put the controller down and stared at it. It seemed unlikely that she would be picking up another controller anytime soon.
“So how did that feel?” I asked.
It was helpful, she said, but beyond gaining a basic understanding of what playing games is like, she felt surprisingly unaltered. Or maybe that was not so surprising. “I’m used to living in a disassociated universe,” she said.
—2011
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NOT GIVING A SHIT
On a Visit with Jim Harrison
I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is, essentially, a New England-sized forest with the population density of Siberia. As of this writing, the U.P. has coughed up a major league pitcher, a couple world-class coaches, and exactly no movie stars, film directors, celebrity chefs, giants of finance, reality television geeks, or (as far as I know) porno queens. Its sons and daughters, by and large, dream feasible dreams. For the U.P.’s young writers, though, it is a little different. This difference is largely due to Jim Harrison, who has been publishing fiction and poetry about the U.P for the last forty years, a good deal of which was written in a cabin up near Grand Marais, a two-hour drive from Escanaba, the U.P. ore town in which I grew up.
